


How to Be a Hero

by Hollyshark



Category: Original Work, Wizard101
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 05:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7878490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hollyshark/pseuds/Hollyshark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The steps on how to properly become a hero of your time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Be a Hero

Your first acts of heroism are always the easiest. You are young and naïve and almost always accompanied by other people. You are giddy with excitement: you are going to save people! Whole civilizations! You will be rewarded greatly for your services! The enemy is weak, the least of the malevolence's worries and the least of your worries. They are predictable, expendable, replaceable. Your misses almost always outnumber your hits. But that's okay. You're still learning, and there will always be others to pick you back up.

Your next acts of heroism take greater focus and more time to achieve. They require a stronger ~~vessel~~ body. You know what to expect from the enemy, until you don't. The idea that you are the only one who can beat down this path slowly permeates into your skull. You are the chosen one, they say, you are the only one who can save us. You begin to hold your own better. You start testing the waters, becoming self-sufficient. You are growing up and up now.

Your third acts of heroism come with a lonely shadow hanging over your shoulder. You cannot expect any consistency anymore. You are completely exhausted from your journeys. You notice that your armor hangs off you; your metal exoskeleton, the part that makes you go, is shedding off you. You notice even fewer friendly faces in the waves of enemies. One night you even feel swamped, cluttered, claustrophobic, dreams fraught with the looks of mixed terror and hatred the damned give you as they fade away. You have to do this alone.

But none of this compares to your fourth acts, or fifth, or sixth. For when you believe the enemy gone, a new horror awaits, like a cruel combination of Russian roulette and Whack-a-Mole; in both, you almost always lose. Your body is too thin—so thin that it begins to reject the food you desperately need to go on. Everywhere you look is dark, and every time you blink, the world comes back out even darker. You begin to shut others out. They don't know your pain, your night terrors. They can't possibly know what you're going through. They can't help you. You believe without a doubt that you are in hell.

You have lost track of all the people you have saved. None of that matters, though, when you can see cracks in your vision and faces in the shadows. You are completely alone, and, in order to survive your loneliness, you have to consume _more_. _More_ power, _more_ energy, _more_ strength. _More_ desperation. Every gaze you fix onto others is as cold and hard and sorrowful as the bodies of the slain, the dead-and-gone, the enemies that thought they were on the winning side laying at your feet.

Nowadays your hands have a chronic shake. Your hair and eyes are dull, no longer alive with the promise and eagerness of being a hero. You are no hero. Instead of trying to save the fallen, you cast them down even farther, sent them where no one belongs. And what do you have to show others the proof of, the validation, that you did this— _you did this because there was NO OTHER CHOICE_ —other than a few flashy titles and beaten armor made in a shithole?

And at the very end you feel wasted. You had so much potential, you think, and now it's gone. Wasted. Spent. And you can't do anything but accept your fate, your whisper thin body beating against the cold, lonely ground, with nothing but a jagged rock to pillow your spinning head. Your helmet has flown off, and your armor has so many dents and holes in it that you might as well be naked. Look at what you have become. Too weak to even lift your own head. The enemy crouches down next to you, and you think to yourself: what a goddamn shame, a goddamn waste. I hate myself, what I've become, and I hate you. I want to you to kill me. How you would _love_ for the pain, the heat, the shock, the numbness to dissipate. All you want is death. And all that awaits you now is death.


End file.
